Day Twenty Fourth to Thirty First

Psion Hacking - Bluetooth on a Psion Series 5

tldr

• Added a Bluetooth Low Energy/Serial module to a Psion Series 5 by directly connecting it to the internal serial lines before the RS232 converter
• Connected the Psion to my Macbook wirelessly, transfered files via y-modem and setup a PPP connection to browse local files using FTP and local html pages.

Long Read

I’ve been slowly hacking up one of my Psion Series 5 PDA’s, in previous posts I identifed an issue with the button that turns the CF card on/off and moved this to a new switch at the front of the device. To find space for this I removed the media buttons as I don’t plan to ever use them - this opened up a reasonable amount of space that could be used for other hardware upgrades. The Psion Series 5 (S5) is probably the best PDA ever made (okay the 5mx is better but I don’t have one of those) and while its keyboard and design hasn’t been surpassed it is lacking in builtin connectivity (beyond a RS232 cable and IrDA), being able to use the device ‘wirelessly’ seems great.

Day Fifteen to Twenty Third

As we’ve approached christmas I’ve become increasingly busy with real world things and so have had less time to do any adventures.

Solarcene.community

The good news is that with the latest power schedule and a few good days of sun we’ve managed to keep the whole system online. It didn’t help that the certbot certificate expired for 24hrs which I didn’t realise (just assumed that the server was offline) but it was an easy fix. Its going to be a long winter though so will keep me busy trying to keep things running on minimal sun.

Day Ten to Fifteen

So I’m not doing that well at documenting my December Adventure (though its been busy)

Solarcene.community Mastodon Instance

The main focus of the last few days has been trying to keep the mastodon instance running. We’ve had basically cloud for the last 2 weeks coupled with Storm Darragh. This has meant that out of the last 14 days we have had 8 days where the panels have only generated < 100Wh. Even with the current power saving setup the watts add up and the battery dipped down to critical levels and then cut out. I was then able to use my portable backup battery for 48hrs - just enough time for finally some sun to appear and get the battery back to a point where it can survive.

Day Six to Ten

I’ve had a busy few days both at work and also at home so my December Adventure has slightly fallen off so I’ll lump the little bit of work I’ve done together into a single post.

Psion Hardware Hacking

Recently I’ve been taking the train to work (its more expensive but I feel better inside, quite enjoy the journey and also appreciate not sitting in infuriating traffic), the train only takes 14 minutes and I’ve been playing with my Psion Series 5. While I’m really a big fan of Psion Revos I have to admit that the Series 5 is a superior machine to work on (the keyboard is just awesome). It turns out that my S5 wasn’t detecting a CF card, initially I thought it might be that my 21 year old card that was sitting in my damp garage was dead but it turns out there is a small internal switch in the S5 which when closed initiates the CF card interface. The switch is switched by the CF card door which in my case had broken. I therefore opened up the case, identifed a the signal line for the switch (adjacent to the nearby LED) and then soldered in a new switch. To make place for the switch itself I removed the ‘media’ buttons as I really don’t need this feature and then with a bit of careful superglue secured the switch (be careful not to get glue in the switch mechanism as it will be game over for the switch).

Day Six

Nothing today as was busy with real world stuff!

Day Five

Some success - I spent a bit of time using Inkscape to draw a diagram of the power setup for solarcene.community, its definitly a bit rough and would be happy for suggestions for alternative ways of drawing the diagram. I uploaded the png to the git repo and wrote up a little summary of the various components. I plan to at some point add some details about power consumption etc as well as a network diagram (I didn’t think it would be sensible to have both in the same image).

Day Four

Didn’t manage to get anything done today, oh well thats the nice thing about December Adventure. Have more time tomorrow so hopefully will be able to layout my system diagram to help explain the setup.

Day Three

Managed to get the first bit of documentation completed, I’ve gone for something easy - the custom 50x html error code which is displayed when the main solarcene.community server is offline. The goal is to provide a little bit on information to any visitors when the main server is offline.

You can check out Custom 50x Git for more details (when the server is online of course!).

Day Two

Minimal day today, did a tiny bit of OPL coding on my Psion Series 5 while on the train but its only a 12 minute journey so not that long - I did enjoy working on the Series 5, considering it was released in 1997 it still is probably the best portable writing device out there.

Following that I planned to start documenting my solar setup but fell into the trap of running a solar powered server which is designed to turn off at night when its got a low battery (or predicts poor solar power for the day) and therefore when I got round to actually doing some work found it was offline. While the original point of the system was an experiement in sustainabilty it has developed into a an experiment into the challenges of working with a system that isn’t always online. What I have learnt from running the solarcene.community mastodon instance (which runs on the solar server) is that when it is offline the best thing to do is enjoy that its offline!

Starting December Adventure

I found about the low key coding challenge through the Psion User Discord and it was cool to see that a number of people I follow on mastodon took part previously. In a slight variation I’ve decided to focus on documentation as I’ve been promising to write up all the projects particularly the solar setup of solarcene.community. I’ll use a combination of this blog site and the gitea server I have at https://git.solarcene.community